Graders

Overview

The plethora of information and content available on the public Internet wrought forth a boom in the early 2000s in the area of web search engines. Companies such as Altavista, Excite, and Yahoo were the players, and the game had an ambitious objective: for all the unknown web pages that existed in cyberspace: (1) locate them in some fashion (through links, through guessing, etc.); (2) obtain the content from those pages; and (3) make that content available to users who enter in a few search terms into an input box on a web page.

As the web grew (into the billions of pages range circa 2000) , search engines had to become smarter to deal with the data management problems induced with collecting such an archive -- storage, availability, processing, failover, redundancy were only some of the challenges that had to be addressed.

This course will afford the student a complete treatment of web search engines, its foundation, principles, and elements, including that which is described above. The class is centered around paper reading assignments, and an individual presentation that will test comprehension and understanding of the course reading material. A class project will require the student to leverage the search engine techniques learned during the course (e.g., ranking, crawling , content analysis and detection, query models ) to, coupled with programming/implementation effort leveraging modern open source search technologies from Apache, design and implement a component of a real-world search engine.

In addition to foundations, and practical experience with search engines, the class will also introduce the student to the state-of-the-art in search engine research, future trends and state-of-the-practice. Students are expected to attend class regularly, and participate (as directed) in all class discussions, and most importantly, have fun!

Academic Integrity

Students must work independently on all
individual assignments; collaborating on individual assignments is considered
cheating and will be penalized accordingly. All USC students are responsible for
reading and following the USCStudent
Conduct Code, whichprohibits plagiarism.
Some examples of behavior that is not allowed are: copying all or part of
someone else's work (by hand or by looking at others' files, either secretly or
if shown), and submitting it as your own; giving another student in the class a
copy of your assignment solution; consulting with another student during an
exam; and copying text from published literature without proper attribution. If
you have questions about what is allowed, please discuss it with the instructor.

Students who violate University standards of
academic integrity are subject to disciplinary
sanctions, including failure in the course
and suspension from the University. Since dishonesty in any form harms the
individual, other students, and the University, policies on academic integrity
have been and will be strictly enforced.

Assignments and
Examinations

Name

Description

Weight

Assignments where you will build on the search engine topics in course (information retrieval, ranking, content detection and analysis, indexing, processing, etc.) and make a contribution to one of the existing Apache search technologies (Nutch, Lucene, Solr, Tika, OODT, etc.).

60%

Project Submission Guidelines

Please refer to this document for guidelines on submitting your assignments.